Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
3 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,815 Year: 3,072/9,624 Month: 917/1,588 Week: 100/223 Day: 11/17 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Evolution: Science or Religion?
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 2 of 41 (46500)
07-19-2003 11:16 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by EndocytosisSynthesis
07-19-2003 11:13 AM


Endo,
Before we begin, please define religion & science. Once we've thrashed out what these things actually are, the answer becomes clear.
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.
[This message has been edited by mark24, 07-19-2003]

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-19-2003 11:13 AM EndocytosisSynthesis has not replied

  
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 5 of 41 (46503)
07-19-2003 12:56 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by EndocytosisSynthesis
07-19-2003 11:31 AM


Endo,
Science: 1) Does not contain 100% proven facts. It contains observations that lead to a tentative conclusion. 3) Theorems do not have to be a/ proven, or b/ require experiments.
Science is a process that inductively creates a hypothesis, & then sets about deductively testing that hypothesis. As such, a theory can be very poorly supported indeed to begin with, yet still be scientific.
Religion: 1 & 2 are OK, everything after that seems unnecessary to me. One quibble, though. Events do not need to be observed in science, either. The difference is, that to be scientific an event must have supporting evidence that such an event took place. Kind of like reconstructing a crime scene. With religion, no such standard is applied.
I would add, religion requires no observations whatsoever for it's beliefs. Events in a religion are not required to be tested, nor can they necessarily be falsified.
Agreed?
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-19-2003 11:31 AM EndocytosisSynthesis has not replied

  
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 8 of 41 (46512)
07-19-2003 2:22 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by EndocytosisSynthesis
07-19-2003 1:57 PM


Endo,
What about the Supreme Court's Ruling on Creationism in Schools:
They said that 1. The science must be observable and 2. Must be scientifically proven.
Cite pls. I seriously doubt they were the exact words or intended meaning.
If a scientific fact isn't proven, then its not a 100% assured truth. If it's not, which Evolution isn't, then It's not the scientific fact proven to be true which so many claim it to be.
This is fairly easily demonstrated. Have you ever seen an electron? No? Are electrons not scientific, then?
The center of the sun is calculated in the order 20 million K. Do you think it has been measured directly (observed)?
No. Both of the above are inferences made from other observations, predictions were made that have been tested.
I repeat. There is no such thing as a 100% scientific fact. All science can do is reduce the tentativity of a hypothesis/theory to an insignificant amount. It was once thought that atoms were solid & had charge carrying particulates embedded in them (plum pudding theory of the atom), it was then realised that atoms are mostly space & that electron particles orbited the nucleus. It was then realised that there are many layers of electons, & then that they aren't necessarily particles at all. All of the above are scientific explanations that best fit the observations at the time. Are you really arrogant enough to assume that particle physics, & quantum theory as it stands today is going to be the last word? If not, according to you they can't be science then, can they?
You put yourself in an untenable position, on the one hand it has to be 100% science fact in order to be science. On the other, the hundreds of thousands of scientists can't be doing science if they are trying to find things out, by definition. If it isn't already known to a 100% accuracy, then anything associated with it can't be science, right? Wrong, utterly & completely wrong.
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-19-2003 1:57 PM EndocytosisSynthesis has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 11 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-19-2003 5:22 PM mark24 has replied

  
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 9 of 41 (46513)
07-19-2003 2:24 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by Admin
07-19-2003 2:19 PM


Re: Guideline Warning
Good grief! Percy, you have to get up early in the morning to catch you out, mate.
Mark

This message is a reply to:
 Message 7 by Admin, posted 07-19-2003 2:19 PM Admin has not replied

  
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 16 of 41 (46527)
07-19-2003 6:35 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by EndocytosisSynthesis
07-19-2003 5:22 PM


Endo,
No I haven't seen an electron with my own eyes, but I have seen photographs of them by electron microscopes and I know that scientists have seen electrons before.
LOL, have you really seen one, even on a photograph? No, you haven't. You think you have? Please provide a photograph of an electron. I think you are probably confusing this with something else. NO scientist has seen an electron, & nor have you. They are too small, you never know exactly where they are, & they don't reflect photons, much less other electrons in such a way an image can be formed. It would be like taking a photograph of an elephant with a camera that fired elephants out of the flash bulb.
So, I repeat, given that no one has observed an electron, do you still think their existence scientific, or not? That is, are you prepared to concede that for something to be scientific, it need not be observed? In fact, it's rather a requirement, or science would have cleaned up centuries ago.
Science isn't about Truth? So I guess that means that Science could be false
That's right. Science might be false. Just like all other scientific theories that have gone by the wayside but were still scientific......
and not truthful and in other words it's irrelevant because It's not the actual truth its just our best understanding which has been wrong before and will be in the future.
I wouldn't have said irrelevant. But yes, that's about right. Different theories are qualitatively different. It's all about getting the level of tentativity to a minimum. A theory might not be wrong as such, just require tweaking when new data becomes avaliable. Take the atomic theory I outlined in my last post. With each new observation we get closer & closer to reality, we can just never know when we are there.......The theory gets less & less tentative... If you ever arrive at a point where someone says, "hey, this is the absolute truth", there can be no room for improvement. How do we know there is no room for improvement? We don't, so we never pretend we have the truth. That's what theists do. That's all it means. That's a huge gap between that & saying something is 50/50 because it is tentative. Take my ol' favourite, phylogenetic analyses, for example. This takes sequence data & produces an "evolutionary tree" with it. Now how many potential evolutionary trees are there taking in ten organisms, do you think? If evolution is true, there is only one true tree, so this type of data should return similar, if not identical results....... There are 34,500,000 possible trees for a ten organism phylogeny. Why is it that phylogenies return such similar results at such vast odds of it occurring by chance? That's 34,500,000:1 for just two ten taxa phylogenies that are 100% congruent, with this data alone we can reduce the tentativity that evolution occurred by an alarming degree, wouldn't you say?
If science is not 100% assured truth than that means Evolution isn't 100% assured to be true, so that means that all those at put faith into to be 100% true are nothing more than religious zealots, because by science Evolution hasn't been proven to 100% true.
No scientist says evolutionary theory is 100% true. This is probably the crux of your misunderstanding, creationists often judge others by their own standards, ie Adhere by blind faith in claiming the absolute truth of something, & assume others who disagree do the same. Not so.
I maintain there is enough independent corroborating evidence that evolution occurred to indicate that it is unreasonable to deny. But there is still much to know as to how it occurred. I wouldn't hold your breath that there is going to be a revolution that reinterprets the data in such a way that evolution never occurred. It would require too many disciplines to be fundamentally rewritten & interpreted a different way. This is why most creationist literature is exposed as the shite it is. It is simply not consistent with all known data.
In summary, I maintain that evolutionary theory meets the standards of the scientific method, & is therefore science.
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-19-2003 5:22 PM EndocytosisSynthesis has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 18 by nator, posted 07-19-2003 11:57 PM mark24 has not replied

  
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 32 of 41 (46592)
07-20-2003 6:08 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by EndocytosisSynthesis
07-20-2003 12:50 PM


Endo,
We can observe gravity every day, evolution from ape to man cannot be observed everyday.
No, you don't "observe" gravity every day. You observe an alleged force acting upon objects, not gravity. Only careful experimentation showed this force was attributed to mass, as opposed to something else, & can you really be sure we understand even that correctly? No one has seen "force", only it's effects, & no one truly knows what causes gravitation. Even Newtons ideas on gravity did not fully explain gravities effects. Given your requirement for something to be considered scientific is for it to be 100% act, this means Newton wasn't a scientist, right?
Please respond to message 16. I am trying to make two points.:
1/ An event/object need not be observed for it's investigation to be scientific. Remember the electrons that no one has seen?
2/ Science is tentative, not full of 100% facts. Tentativity is reduced by predictions made by a hypothesis being borne out, ie corroborating evidence.
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 19 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-20-2003 12:50 PM EndocytosisSynthesis has not replied

  
mark24
Member (Idle past 5195 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 33 of 41 (46593)
07-20-2003 6:22 PM
Reply to: Message 29 by EndocytosisSynthesis
07-20-2003 4:35 PM


Endo,
I'm arguing that Creationism it too complex to fall into a simple category of man's science. Creationism is everything, not simply science.
Circular argument. You have to accept the premise in order to accept the conclusion. You have no way of testing, & potentially falsifying (that you would accept) creations claims, "creationism is everything" is therefore a hollow, premature claim. Not only is creationism not science, but it's not logical, either, it seems.
How is creationism "too complex" for science? There are many, many aspects of science that leave creationism standing in kindegarten with it's zipper hanging open on the complexity front. What a strange thing to say! In fact, creationism is very, VERY easy. God did it. It is this simplistic appeal that attracts people.
This leads me onto my main point. Assuming we are going to ascribe the same standards of logic to both science & creationism, & your assumption sans evidence aside. How do we determine what makes our world tick? Obviously just assuming we have the truth, often in the face of contradictory evidence, let alone none at all like creationism does is insufficient.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, you need address message 16 before we can continue. We need to agree our premises; what science actually is.
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 29 by EndocytosisSynthesis, posted 07-20-2003 4:35 PM EndocytosisSynthesis has not replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024